every version of ccie is hard and / or fascinating depends on perception ... version 1 tough cabling and stuff still hard because of lack of exposure and training.. v 4 has so many technologies to learn ... there is no diff if you are ccie #1 or ccie #25k+ ... at the end of the day the only thing which should matter it are you a kind of expert in what version you mastered and now are you a better human being with some knowledge
Regards
Rakesh
ccna ccnp (in prog and not willing to complete ) jncia jncis - er ex sec junos mcse
mcitp ent admin J-Partner sales certified ---- x y z
Any Fool Can Know The Point Is To Understand - Einstein

good to see your interest and as i see you are pretty much interested in hardware the next logical part would be networking .. i would recommend you to download some a+ and n+ text books or video tutorials (i would prefer these) and get to know new things and ways of building them ... dont be in a mind set of preparing for a certification exam that should come as byproduct from your prep
good luck
Rakesh

great feedbacks provided by every one ... now as i recollect something we generally have two planes
one is data plane and one is forwarding plane .. i dont know how cisco operates , taking this analogy the switching and cef operates at forwarding plane and thats agreed .. now when we get into other vendors they may or may not support this plane division concept , now taking on them how can you say that router should support ip cef as far as my knowledge goes is cisco prop ? so , does this eliminate the option that other vendors dosent support load balancing ?

i would go with B faisal bhai ... as load balancing would be supported by many of the vendors it may not be entirely dependent on cisco cef . wild thought and load balancing can be done without switches hehe
sort of elimination mechanism iam adapting

i get some big picture now ! may be there might be reluctance from people rather me seeing a Vod and attending a live bootcamp .. in a live bootcamp may be we might care about more money , other friends stuff ... sort of chill pill
all of my life till now with regards to ccie prep was definitely dead slow ... seeing your response and feed back should hit on some speed now ! but when i speed up thing i tend to complete it in a more swift way and i always feel 8 hours would always be much more enough seeing people doing lab in 5.5 hours with their verification done .... i think these wild thoughts and doubts could only be clarified once i hit the actual lab and see for my self where am i lacking things
thank you for the info provided
good luck

well thanks for the update on bootcamp ! well i am not that experienced to start with ... can you clarify me one question please .. you must have done some good workbooks may not be full length but some typical scenarios right .. when i did them let us take some ospf distribute lists , pbr sort of things i used to figure out what should be used and where .. now seeing your bootcamp exp can we weigh ourselves based on the way we solve workbook questions ?
is there anything extra or new covered in bootcamps ?
Regards
Rakesh